Predictable Hyper-growth at Magento (acq by Adobe)

A few months ago we interviewed Jess Walia Weimer, Head of Global Demand and Growth Marketing at Magento (acquired by Adobe June 2018). Jess has spent most of her career helping hyper-growth businesses build “predictability at scale,” and she shared many fascinating insights with us. We decided to share this interview again as it touches on some very relevant topics.

Background and Career

Jess said she has always had an “obsession with numbers,” and majored in marketing and business administration. Early on in her career, she realized how underemphasized “numbers” were in b2b marketing. She said that historically, tech companies in particular would find it hard to justify brand campaigns in terms of ROI, and she believes this is still prevalent to some degree. The challenge of finding success (as measured by ROI) at each stage of the funnel is something that has kept her interested in the fast-evolving field of marketing.

We asked Jess about mentors who have impacted her career and she mentioned Debbie Jo Severin. She said Debbie Jo worked with her early on in her career, and then again at 8×8. She said she taught her how to think about working as a team to achieve great results, and how to motivate and influence people and conversations to get things done.

We asked Jess about thought-provoking books she recommends, and she mentioned, in a similar vein to the advice given by Debbie Jo, a book called: Influencer: The New Science of Leading Change by Kerry Patterson et al. The book mentions “three keys to success—keys that all influencers adhere to and that you can use to your own benefit: 1. Focus and measure. Influencers are crystal clear about the result they are trying to achieve and are zealous about measuring it. 2. Find vital behaviors. Influencers focus on high-leverage behaviors that drive results. More specifically, they focus on the two or three vital actions that produce the greatest amount of change. 3. Engage all six sources of influence.”

Jess said that when she read the book, she thought the authors had been reading her mind and her mantra of: “focus and measure.”

Moving Upmarket

Magento has done well in the SMB market, and is now expanding in the mid-market and enterprise. Jess described some of the interesting tactical shifts involved in moving upmarket.

She said with smaller businesses, the sales cycle is not as long and can appear more transactional. With the mid-market and enterprise, the stakeholder stack grows rapidly, and they each respond differently. She said, for example, you won’t have a CIO deciding one day to “plop” onto your website and ask to schedule a demo. She or he will often have an entire team evaluating the decision. Therefore, the challenge at the top of the funnel is to get these influencers and researchers looking at the content, so they can bring the Executive decision maker in when they have created their short-list of vendors.

Jess said that another difference is in the lead nurturing process: “you have to take them through the journey in a way that is not annoying.” She said this is something that she is constantly optimizing based on the market segment and company size. We asked Jess the common question: “Is email dead, at least for certain segments?” Her answer: “No, you just have to be smart and relevant about your communication.”

Another area of expansion for Magento is with product offerings. For example, in addition to the eCommerce platform, they also partner with top technology companies such as PayPal to offer integrated financing and payment solutions to Magento customers. With these add-ons presented as a bundled solution, the customer sees how they can present their digital storefront as a seamless shopping experience, thus enhancing the experience of their own customers.

The Power of Propensity Data

We asked Jess her thoughts on social media channels. She said she views paid social as a good way to attract net new prospects, and organic social primarily for reinforcing your message to existing customers (obviously with some overlap between the two). She finds organic social to work best when it is aligned to the product roadmap and corporate communications. She noted that with paid social, you can amplify certain organic efforts where needed, and she said there are ways to “pull levers in new ways, such as retargeting, that you couldn’t a few years ago.”

Jess shared some novel insights on using propensity data from Bombora or TechTarget Priority Engine. Besides the obvious approach of targeting users who signal intent, Jess mentioned they can build profiles of the companies demonstrating intent, see who else fits this profile, and then target based on the profile.

The next level beyond this is to identify clusters of propensity information by their physical geography. Jess recommends creating a strategy with the field teams to align further marketing activities to the location clusters of accounts that show high propensity (attend webinars, respond to nurture campaigns etc) and then create your field events in those locations. She gave the example of a recent deal acceleration event held at the New York Stock Exchange as an instance of moving from digital intent straight to the field. Aligning field marketing activities with this link back to activity at the top of the funnel, Jess said, allows marketing to not rely solely on inside sales or business development reps to do the “heavy lifting” in the field.

Jess said that many marketing organizations would do well to look into shifting some of their dollars to high propensity campaigns. In the absence of having an ABM list, she said this process can help build the list for you: “Here’s who is shopping now.”

The insights that Jess shared with us on the multiple levels of working with intent data, as well as the importance of having a framework for influencing teams to achieve results, was the first in this series so far. We are grateful Jess was so open in sharing these thoughts with us and look forward to continuing our conversations with her in the future.

I have sold multi-million dollar enterprise deals to some of the largest companies in the world; managed high volume transactional SaaS teams, developed & managed channel strategies / partners, sold internationally and been through a couple acquisitions. I have not “seen and done it all”, but I have done quite a few things.

Shastri is a writer and consults with several companies in technology marketing and customer success. He has written many articles for the Huffington Post and Washington Post, and is a guest content contributor for Ziff Davis B2B.

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